Memory Of World War Research Articles

Don’t Mention the War! Second World War Remembrance and Support for European Cooperation

At the core of the European project is the idea that through increased state cooperation and dependency, national divisions can be overcome and peace can be secured on the European continent. National and European elites often make reference to past devastations of the Second World War (WWII) in order to convey the added value of European cooperation among the public. Does WWII remembrance enhance public support for European cooperation? By presenting evidence from a set of novel survey experiments conducted in the six largest member states (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom) in July 2017, this contribution shows that reminding people of the devastations of WWII, increases support for their country’s cooperation within the European Union (EU) today. Yet, only when it comes to providing assistance for other member states in dire economic need. Reminding people of the devastations of WWII does not make people more willing to extend the rights to EU migrants or contribute to the establishment of an European army. These findings are important as they suggest that WWII remembrance triggers a largely transactional response among the public, a willingness to provide financial support combined with an unwillingness to embrace intra-EU migration or security cooperation. This evidence suggests that securing public support for further deepening of free movement of people and European security cooperation through historical rhetoric might be difficult to achieve.

Mass Observation and the Emotional Energy Consumer

Understanding how people lived with energy in the past is becoming increasingly important as policy-makers are paying more attention to the social and cultural factors that condition energy consumption and fix energy demand. This is challenging historians to demonstrate the ways in which energy systems are more than just physical infrastructures set into the built environment but activated by users with complex emotional lives. This article goes some way toward developing this history, building up a profile of the emotional energy consumer. To do this it draws upon a collection of material from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA), University of Sussex, which provides unique access to the emotions British users brought to their energy systems. Drawing upon a series of Directives written in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the article considers how energy demand was shaped by the complex emotional cultures of Thatcherite Britain. The article proposes two different approaches to do this. The first approach considers how observers rooted emotions about energy in longer individual and social timeframes. This uncovers the importance of time in fostering emotions toward energy, from the lived experience of transitions, to the social memory of World War II and circulating rhetoric about the future. The second approach considers how emotions — such as sentimentality, nostalgia, love and fear — structured energy choices and led to particular configurations of energy use in the home. By demonstrating how emotion mediated between observers and their energy systems this article argues for the necessity of developing histories of energy focussed not only upon energy systems but that centre the complex subjectivities of users as well as their emotional cultures.

Commemorating the First World War in Britain: A Cultural Legacy of Media Remembrance

One of the often-overlooked legacies of the First World War is how the conflict established the media’s role in remembrance. In the years that have followed, media’s circulation of iconic images of national and local commemoration have enabled individuals to engage with public remembrance. This article takes a historical approach to First World War remembrance in Britain, looking at how the practices and meaning of remembrance became established, although they were never fixed but instead constantly shifting, reinvented and contested. They are also gendered, in remembrance, as in war, women, are often seen as to be playing supportive roles; yet within media texts, women have always found spaces to exert influence over who is remembered and how, as memories jostle for prominence.

The BDA First World War Memorial.

The First World War cost many lives and the dental profession was not exempt. Some were serving in their professional capacity within the forces, but many were not. The British Dental Association wished to commemorate those members who had sacrificed their lives by providing a Memorial plaque at the association's headquarters.

World War I commemoration and student historical consciousness: A study of high-school students' views

Commemoration of World War I (WWI), and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, holds a significant place in the Australian public imagination. This is currently heightened with the WWI centenary commemorations (2014–18) occurring on a local, national and international scale. In the current political climate, there has been a resurgence of nationalism amid fear of terrorist attacks and uncertain political futures. Traditionally, history education has been considered, by some, a tool for the promotion of national identity, despite history education literature and many curriculum documents increasingly focused on fostering historical consciousness in students. The Gallipoli campaign, and subsequent Anzac mythology, has maintained a strong focus in Australia as a means of promotion, and often celebration, of Australian culture in public history, including personal and familial connections via ancestral participation in WWI. This article explores the types of historical education conducted in three high schools. As part of a regular history lesson, students were provided with five sources and a series of questions to answer about the Gallipoli campaign as a historical and commemorative event. Students' responses are analysed in this paper using Jörn Rüsen's typology of historical consciousness (Rüsen, 2004) to gain an understanding of how students think about the commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign. Specifically, this paper is interested in students' navigation of collective memory and nationalistic narratives evident in the public sphere and popular culture, and how these inform a sense of historical consciousness.

The Making of the Good British Muslim

Abstract This article investigates the meaning and political implications of the poppy hijab, a headscarf sporting British World War Remembrance poppies and intended to give British Muslims a new way of showing their social integration in public. Based on fieldwork with Muslims in London, I argue, however, that instead of furthering Muslims’ equitable inclusion in British society, the poppy hijab rather represents a Foucauldian “technology of the self” for them to prove that they are “good British Muslims”. As such, it reflects the unequal relations of power in society and may foster rather than lower general suspicion towards Muslims in Britain.

Good war/bad war: a war to remember, a war to forget?

ABSTRACTThis paper uses the distinction that has been developed within organizational studies between collected memory and collective memory to explore and contrast the nature of one multinational company’s organizational memory of World War I and World War II. Although the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) experienced severe upheavals as a result of each of the two global military conflagrations of the twentieth century, this paper argues that in terms of its organizational memory there exist clear distinctions between the two. During the course of World War I, BAT was able for the first time to generate a degree of common identity which served it well in the course of its post war expansion during the 1920s. This emergence of a more unified culture, underpinned by a range of common reference points for its staff based on texts, buildings and monuments, facilitated a company-wide collective memory of the war which was subsequently used to promote an esprit de corps across the organization. During World War II, these common cultural reference points were not developed. Thus an organizational memory of World War II only emerged many decades after the event and took the form of a collected memory based on individual recollections.

Genocide, Holodomor and Holocaust Discourse as Echo of Historical Injury and as Rhetorical Radicalization in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict of 2013–18

ABSTRACTThe Ukrainian crisis has caused an ongoing political confrontation between Russia and Ukraine since 2013. It has been marked by a rhetoric drawing on differently interpreted memories of World War II, the Holodomor and the Holocaust. The rhetoric of “genocide” has become a common denominator in the confrontation over the Ukrainian East and the Crimea. Following Russia's aggression vis-à-vis Ukraine since 2014, Russian and pro-Russian Ukranian voices from politics and the media have accused Ukraine of genocide, which aimed to demonize the perceived enemy, mobilize internal support and gain interpretative authority over events. Ukraine has responded by intensifying its historical discourse of genocide, framing Putin's policies as a direct successor to Stalin's policies of destroying Ukraine. The present article analyses the nature of the rhetoric of the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and of genocide more generally, in the present Ukrainian conflict. It also examines the relationship of this rhetoric with the respective discourses of memory in Ukraine and to lesser extent in Russia. The discussion demonstrates how emphatically the traumas of the past reverberate in this post-Soviet conflict, and suggests that such historical resonance may have to do with the proclivity of both Russia and Ukraine to avoid their historical responsibilities.

Електронно-картографічний проект «Місця пам’яті про Другу світову війну на адміністративно-територіальній мапі України»: проблеми джерельної бази

The article is devoted to problems of sources and interpretation of existing sources in the museum that facing the scientifi c staff of the Memorial when creating the museum electronic map project «Places of the Memory of Second World War on the territorial administrative map of Ukraine». In particular to such resources as various cartographic products, reference to atlases, archival materials, diaries and reports of fi ghting, and others. The attention is paid to the fact that this electronic map project is an important component of future re-exposure of the museum.

Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

In the closing phase of the Algerian War in March 1962, Jean-Marie Domenach, director of the journal Esprit, upbraided his counterpart at Les Temps modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre, for failing to understand the greyness of most human actions and the pervasiveness of knots of complicity. Concern for the complexity of complicity was also apparent in Les Temps modernes circles, however, and it was precisely complicity, both in the form of violence of French troops and of the habituation or indifference of the broader French public, that editor Simone de Beauvoir termed a ‘tetanus of the imagination’. Strikingly, she suggested that a means of countering this affliction of getting used to the unconscionable were testimonies of soldiers returning from Algeria in both Les Temps modernes and Esprit. This article examines this mutual concern for the complexities of complicity and investigates its relationship to memory through the curious importance de Beauvoir placed on such testimonies in these two journals. The discussion looks at the mobilisation of the memory of the Second World War in these testimonies, including analogies with fascism and Nazism, and argues that, rather than merely fashionable hyperbole, they powerfully depicted a multifaceted crisis: in Algeria, of French youth, and of France itself. The second part of the article investigates the testimonies’ representation of military institutionalisation – including its detrimental effects on imagination and the facilitation of violence. These representations of systemic or institutional complicity are contextualised alongside scholarly claims that the Algerian war involved a renegotiation of the memory of Vichy France. I argue that the example of these testimonies calls for a qualification of such claims; though they prefigured later conceptions of a complicity memory trope, or ‘the grey zone’ of Vichy France, they did not override the dominant Second World War memory characterised by heroes and victims.

Militarisation, Memorialisation & Multiculture: Muslims and the 2014 Centenary Commemorations of World War One in Britain

This essay focuses attention on the efforts to include Muslims from the past and present in a series of initiatives during the UK 2014 Centenary Commemorations, including the memorialisation of Muslim soldiers from WWI and the creation of the Poppy Hijab. For the armed forces, the revival of the historical legacy of a multicultural military serves to legitimise the military's image and their contemporary efforts in the War on Terror. On the other hand, the initiatives polarised opinion amongst supportive British Muslims and opponents of the Poppy Hijab. The essay situates these events in critical literature on militarisation and memorialisation.

Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania

This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish medical doctor and writer from Bucharest, a collection of photographs depicting scenes from Romanian daily life in the 1930s and 1940s, and recordings of political speeches and propaganda songs of a Fascist nature. Through a careful framing of this film in relation to Romanian public memory of World War II, and in connection to the popular new wave cinema, I will contend that Jude’s work acts, perhaps unwittingly, to intervene in public memory and invites the Romanian public to face up to and acknowledge the nation’s perpetrator past. This filmic intervention further offers an important platform for public debate on Romania’s Holocaust memory and is of significance for European public memory, as it proposes the film happening as a distinct and innovative practice of public engagement with history.

Triumph of the Till

Triumph of the Till

Europeanization of the Cemeteries of World War I in West Galicia

Focusing primarily on the Łużna-Pustki military cemetery constructed by the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front after the Battle of Gorlice, also known as the ‘Little Verdun’ (2-5 May 1915), the article deals with the memory of World War I and its use in local, national (Polish) and European contexts. The text shows the history of this lieu de mémoire: its creation, cultural and artistic contexts, and ultimate slide into oblivion during the interwar period and after World War II, before a resurrection in interest in Poland at the turn of the 21st century. Taking into consideration Europeanization processes, the author shows how tangible remnants of World War I are brought into the limelight within European frames of reference and discusses the consequences of this discursive reinterpretation of the Łużna-Pustki military cemetery, awarded a European Heritage Label in 2016.

Family Legacies in the Centenary: Motives for First World War Commemoration among British and German Descendants

This article investigates the affective motives for remembrance among British and German descendants of men and women who served in the First World War. Based on observations of a First World War centenary project funded by the Heritage Lottery and hosted in Bavaria in early 2016 by the London-based reminiscence organization Age Exchange, it asks why people are drawn to research the First World War pasts of their ancestors and how their historical pursuits connect personal experience to public commemoration in the two countries. It develops an understanding of legacy as operating across time in two directions: backwards from contemporary preoccupations to the First World War, and forwards across generations, from the survivors and their descendants to the present.

It Still Goes On: Trauma and the Memory of the First World War

Artykul opisuje podstawowe elementy reprezentacji pierwszej wojny światowej: cierpienie zolnierzy, spustoszone pola bitewne oraz perspektywe świadka. Odnosząc sie do stanu dotychczasowych badan nad traumą w kontekście pierwszej wojny światowej, ukazuje kliszowy charakter jej pamieci potocznej, ktory jednak nie wyklucza komunikowania i podtrzymywania poczucia traumy. Poprzez ocene najnowszych powieści oraz produkcji filmowych i telewizyjnych tekst analizuje wspolczesne praktyki przedstawiania traumatycznej przeszlości, związane z problematyką tozsamości. Analizie poddane są teksty kultury powstale po obchodach osiemdziesiątej rocznicy zakonczenia wojny, kulturowe reprezentacje wojny, utrwalające poczucie traumy w Australii, Wielkiej Brytanii i Kanady i konstytuujące tozsamości ich mieszkancow. Autor traktuje te zjawiska jako wytwor kapitalistycznego przemyslu rozrywkowego, a zarazem jako wyraz powszechnego pragnienia podtrzymania tradycyjnych wyobrazen na temat przeszlości.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Conspiratorial Revisions of World War II History in Recent Russian Cinema

This article analyzes revisions of World War II history in recent Russian cinema and television, including the feature filmThe Match(Andrei Maliukov, 2012),Spy (Aleksei Andrianov, 2012), and the television seriesLiquidation(Sergei Ursuliak, 2007). All these productions rely on the logic of conspiracy theory for their reimaginations of war history: pivotal developments during the war or its aftermath are presented as the result of subterranean manipulations by enemies or intelligence services. Through a narrative and visual analysis, the article shows how these films and series use the notion of conspiracy to reformat the contexts of wartime events and to place them within a speculative “bigger picture.” In doing so, they infer that what we know about the past is merely a part or effect of larger, hidden designs. Finally, the article situates these findings within a wider “reconciliation with the Soviet” in Putin-era culture, which increasingly centers on the remembrance of World War II.

Physically absent, visually present: Joachim Schumacher’s photographs of Germany’s Ruhr Valley

This article examines the photographs of Joachim Schumacher for their vision of a landscape haunted by the forgotten, the silenced and the increasingly invisible lives erased by the re-articulation of Germany’s Ruhr region. The article places Schumacher’s work in relationship to post-war German photography, both that which imagines the memories of World War II and the Holocaust, as well as the 1980s urban photographs of the Düsseldorf School photographers. Within this context, Schumacher’s photographs are understood for their location of place and history on the revitalized Ruhr landscape. In addition, the article considers the photographs in relationship to the New Topographics to demonstrate their simultaneous placelessness. In this international context, Schumacher’s photographs can be seen as indicative of a European placelessness that has emerged in the wake of the closure of mining and industry.

Mothers, prostitutes, and the collapse of the USSR: the representation of women in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Zinky Boys

ABSTRACTIn Zinky Boys, Svetlana Aleksievich’s “documentary novel” about the Soviet-Afghan War, women are represented in three ways: the “Motherland-mother” construct implicit in the memory of World War II but that does not fit the Soviet-Afghan War; the “mournful mother” construct of those (a majority in the book) who do not accept the loss of their sons for what they see as an unjust cause; and the “morally-loose woman-at-war” construct rooted in men’s predatory behaviour. Amid the dramatic political reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the representation of women in Zinky Boys reflects a changing discourse in Soviet society on the war in Afghanistan that helped pave the way for the collapse of the USSR. The alienation of returning veterans, the pain of mourning mothers who do not accept the reason for their sons’ deaths, and the pervasiveness of a “bad girls” image of women who served in the war all combined to undercut the power of the Motherland-mother construct so much a part of the cult of World War II this generation grew up on. Disillusionment with the Soviet-Afghan War was a crucial part of the unravelling of the discursive conditions of the late Soviet period.

Remediating the past: YouTube and Second World War memory in Ukraine and Russia

This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting on audiovisual materials. This article employs content analysis to assess audiovisual tributes to the Battle of Kyiv from two perspectives: that of representation (how the event is presented on YouTube) and that of interaction (how YouTube users interact with memory of the event). This article concludes that although YouTube is frequently used for the propagation of nationalistic interpretations of the past in Ukraine and Russia, it still has the potential to democratize collective remembrance of the Second World War.